the Negotiation of Context by the Icelandic composer David Brynjar Franzson is a set of three independent pieces (2009-2011) for the New York quartet Yarn/Wire. Each piece is assembled from sounds and situations laid over a topography of pre-existing programmes: the history of the instruments, the social dynamics of the performers and the way the piece is presented. What the listener hears is a series of materials that embody how players work with or against each other.
Yarn/Wire, a quartet of two pianists and two percussionists, was founded in 2005 at Stony Brook University by graduate students who found the repertoire for their unusual line-up too small and set out to commission their own. Here the pianists are Laura Barger and Ning Yu, while Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg play percussion and pump organ and act as assistants. The recording was made from 14 to 16 January 2013 during a residency at EMPAC, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Argeo Ascani, the composer and the quartet produced it, with Stephen McLaughlin as recording engineer.
In the Negotiation of Context (A) the piano and the pump organ explore their similarities and differences, each extending its sound into the other's domain. The relation between the two players works through mimicry and opposition, playing as one and playing alone. (B) widens this dynamic to two pairs of identical instruments, two pianos and two modified bass drums. The performers imitate each other's sounds and actions across the instruments, fusing piano with drum, and within each pair, fusing the two into one. In (C) one performer plays the keyboard of a piano while a second touches its strings with fingers and metal slides. Only the combined actions of the two produce a given sound.
The three pieces were heard as a full cycle at Roulette in New York in 2012, before the recording sessions, and EMPAC later presented two of its movements in concert. The disc is an enhanced CD: besides the audio, it carries a performance video of (B), filmed by Mick Bello and Eric G. Brucker and edited by Bello. Franzson wrote the liner notes himself.
CD-extra (audio and video), Wergo WER 7313 2, released in 2014 (47'11").
